


Cigarettes and Housework

by Missy



Category: Burn Notice
Genre: Child Abuse, Community: winter_deaddrop, Drama, Dysfunctional Family, Family, Female Protagonist, Gen, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-25
Updated: 2010-12-25
Packaged: 2017-10-14 02:31:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/144368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A day in the life of Madeline Westen.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cigarettes and Housework

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the winter_deaddrop's Holiday Droppathon for accridian.

It always starts at six am.

It’s Frank coming in after a night of carousing, stinking of beer, his pocket filled with change. Or Michael and Nate arguing over a toy, their voices pitched in discord. It’s the clock blinking or the mail slot being swung open or the tv blasting from the living room or the sound of a truck pulling away, trailing smoke and broken promises.

At six am, Madeline Westen gets up.

****

She dresses what her mother used to refer to as ‘trashy’ clothes – bright colors, dangly earrings, cha-cha heels, short dresses in colors that couldn’t be found in nature. It’s what she wore when she’d go out necking with the boys, drinking from their father’s hip flasks and allowing them time to go so far with her. Her mother’s always said that Maddie’s headed for hell, and Maddie isn’t inclined to disagree with her. She puts on two layers of lipstick and remembers that she hid twenty dollars in the cookie jar last night – enough for Michael’s lunch money and grocery shopping.

She sneers into the mirror before starting her day.

***

The pre-breakfast floor show is worthy of center ring at most circuses. Michael has taken apart the phone and, as she shouts at him to make sure it’s in one piece by the time his father gets home, is in the process of screwing it back together. Nate is being Nate, running to Madeline and clinging to her knees, asking if he can have a hug and a glass of orange juice.

The toast burns, the eggs turn into a sulfuric lump of parsley-green gunk – the orange juice is perfect, and you can’t really ruin cereal, so they cling to it, dumping their mail-away-for-a-rebate clown-spackled bowls in the sink. The twenty bucks is gone, of course; Maddie makes peanut butter and jelly, tuna salad; cheese sticks, mixed fruit cups, M&Ms and Snicker bars - all of it impossible for her to burn or over-cook. They get dumped in paper sacks labeled with the boys’ names in black eyeliner.

Michael’s started rolling his eyes whenever she tries to kiss him this year, and Maddie feels a reproving sting as he tucks his baseball cap low to his ears and ducks out the door (it will hurt worse in the future, when he starts pulling away from her touch, making excuses not to kiss her back at night). Nate clings to her for a few moments after their good-bye hug, before Madeline can shoe him out the front door to the honking bus.

She lets out a sigh of relief as it pulls away, then groans as she turns toward the breakfast dishes.

***

Maddie, in her childhood fantasies, never pictured a picket fence or a husband, two kids and a dog and a Leave It To Beaver laugh track. What she had wanted as a girl growing up in Chicago was to get away from her mother. In that, she had succeeded, and for Madeline it was as close to victory as she was going to get while married to Frank Westen.

She polishes floors until the linoleum shines dully up at her. The dishes are put away, and the living room vacuumed – beds are made.

In between each of these tasks, Madeline smokes a cigarette. By the time she’s put on her camel coat to go to the market, she’s down two packs.

***

She knows her family well enough to understand what each of them wants – oranges for Michael, Crazy Straws for Nate, Ring Dings for the entire family, Michelob for Frank. Madeline doesn’t require anything but two cartons of Winstons, which she pays for with her accumulated points.

She eats chicken sandwiches sitting on the couch during the Young And The Restless. Then it’s time for Loving, followed by Guiding Light. When Michael and Nate come home Reva Shayne is rolling around in a fountain howling at the injustices of life, and Maddie has a platter of Hydrox cookies for her boys with two jelly jars of milk. Nate instantaneously gobbles his down, and Michael takes his into the privacy of his room in silence (there is the matter of his failed report card, which she will only find out about later). Nate switches the channel without asking her permission; Rocky and Bullwinkle fill the screen with their witty, noisy humor – then Roger Ramjet and Super Chicken, and something nosier and more violent and filled with robots and flashing swords.

Michael returns with his homework to watch those cartoons – Madeline thinks he enjoys them too much, but she takes advantage of the boys’ absorption and folds yesterday’s laundry and puts it away. Dinner is TV dinners, which she somehow manages to scorch.

Another pack of cigs get tossed in the garbage before she and the boys circle the wagon for dinner. That’s when Frank slams his way into the house, smelling of motor oil and bearing a bouquet of gas station flowers. Nate jumps up from the table and runs to his father, throwing his arms around his leg. Frank doesn’t shake him off, patting his head – from Michael he gets a stony look and a nod of acknowledgement.

“Don’t you have a hug for your old man?”

Madeline’s well-prepared for the conflict that ensues – Michael’s stony response that he doesn’t, Frank’s bellowed demands for respect, the sight of her husband shaking their son, Nate cowering under the table, and her husband brandishing a belt. She diffuses the situation, as always; Michael goes to bed without dinner. His jaw quivers just once in outrage, then he turns on his heel and runs to his room, locking himself in tightly.

Frank spends the entirety of dinner complaining about Michael’s behavior while he eats both his dessert and his son’s. Madeline fills her speech with ‘yes dears’ and ‘how trues’, privately disagreeing, but keeping her tongue still for the boys’ sake, for her own (Frank hit her once, and only once, in their dating years and lived to regret it, but she wasn’t going to take a chance). Frank polishes off dinner with a loud belch, then plunks down on the couch to watch Monday night Football while Nate lingers on the floor, pushing his toy truck in circles.

Madeline sits beside him, her fingers dish-blistered, smoking another cigarette, feeling less herself in this moment than she has in ages. She shrinks beside Frank, a half-woman, and hates herself for it.

***

At night, they lie down together – Frank half-drunk and bleary-eyed, his face buried in the back of her neck, holding her breast while she stares at Johnny Carson. He gives his monologue on their small black and white set in his familiar, warm tone, and Madeline almost feels as if she knows him. He’s talking about Bette Midler and making jokes about some pop starlet, and it’s all going over and beyond Madeline’s ability to understand it.

With her eyes on the fuzz, she falls asleep.


End file.
